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Hello and welcome to the Silicon Swami blog talk. My name is Jeffrey Bottoms and I am a 41 year old “technical writer”. I have worked in the information technology field from the age of 15. I was born in 1968, the year that the request for proposal went out to build the ARPAnet, what we now know as the internet. Richard Nixon had just been elected president and we were less than a week away from the first orbital visit to the moon.
The fastest computer at that time was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times. With performance of about 1 MFLOP, it remained the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600. Virtual reality was made possible with the development of helmet mounted displays. In 1968, Ivan Sutherland, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, created what is widely considered to be the first virtual reality and augmented reality (AR) head mounted display (HMD) system. It was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the HMD to be worn by the user was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment were simple wireframe model rooms…
Clearly, some of computing’s “modern marvels” aren’t quite as modern as our schools and media would have you believe!